With a hat tip to Business Insider, where I saw this first, and to Pew Research Center's "State of News Media in 2013," which is where it is derived, a new study reveals that the digital space is where the money is still going in the world of news, with a change in revenue that is up 16.6% in 2012 compared to 2011. The rate of growth is down from 2011, but it's still growth. People are getting their news faster and faster and thus, "legacy" news sources like newspapers and magazines have shown sharp declines. I find this kind of sad, since newspapers and especially magazines can report a story with more perspective than the immediate, breaking news, but in this age, their declines are inevitable.

A Look at the PEW Study

PEW has a graph with the help of SNL Kagan, eMarketer, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Publisher's Information Bureau, Newspaper Association of America, and BIA/Kelsey that shows where the money is going:

As you can see, "digital" is outpacing everything. In the race to get the news the fastest, you can't beat digital, so it's no surprise that its where the money is going because it's also where the people are going, as this graph shows (with findings culled from Nielsen, comScore, Alliance for Audited Media and Arbitron):

Even though we don't really comment on TV that much for our purposes, it's pretty interesting that local TV viewership is way down but its revenue is the 2nd highest. Looking at this graph, it shows that digital is practically the only place where the audience is increasing, with a slight increase in cable news. Pew is also reporting that 39% of respondents got their news "yesterday" from a mobile device or tablet, which is up from 34% in 2010.

Here's a quote from the study:

Overall digital advertising grew 17% in 2012 to $37.3 billion, according to eMarketer. Digital advertising makes up around 23% of the total U.S. advertising market, up from 20% in 2011. Display advertising (which is made up of banner ads, video, rich media and sponsorships), the main source of digital ad revenue for news, grew 22% to $15 billion in 2012. While display is still the second-largest type of digital advertising, behind search, eMarketer projects that by 2016 display will outpace search. The majority of that digital revenue was scooped up by the powerful stakeholders in the digital arena—companies such as Google and Facebook.

"Display advertising" includes video, and we all know that is an effective advertising tool, so it'll be interesting to see how video grows within the "display advertising numbers." Anyway, continuing good news for the digital space as it garners more and more attention.

About the Author - Chris Atkinson

Chris Atkinson joined ReelSEO in 2011. He is a longtime film and television reviewer, and has almost two decades of experience in the theater industry. He also writes on his personal blog - http://nymoviereviews.com. View All Posts By - Chris Atkinson